Gene Douglas:
CLASS OF 1959
El Reno High SchoolClass of 1959
El reno, OK
University of North Texas - CounselingClass of 1983
Denton, TX
University of Central OklahomaClass of 1967
Edmond, OK
Redlands Community CollegeClass of 1960
El reno, OK
Gene's Story
What have I been doing for 50-plus years? Most of it might be boring, I think.
Railroad work took me to Goodland Kansas, Denver, and Colorado Springs, briefly several summers, and Omaha for about 6 months.
After graduation from college, I worked for the Job Corps in Wisconsin for about 6 months, until they closed the center to pay for the Viet Nam war. Omaha and Sparta, Wisconsin were both in the winter time. (teeth chattering.)
I'd done eight years in the National Guard, so didn't get into the Viet Nam war. I actually got in to the National Guard when I was 14, so had been in for about 3 years before I was old enough to join.
Got fat, which is a reverse of the old picture. (I weighed 130 pounds when I graduated from HS, and was very proud of the 10 lb. I'd gained that year.)
When I was working on the Chicago & Northwestern railroad and living in a YMCA in Council Bluffs IA, I reached my ideal weight, 150. For about 10 minutes there, I was a handsome devil.
I spent a summer working for a farm family in Norway, and have remained in touch with them ever since. Two have since died, and the 5-year-old daughter now is an engineer who works for the Norwegian navy. I telephone them around Christmas time each year and the daughter is now a Facebook friend.
When I was a senior in high school I played a baritone, and was better than the juniors, sophomores and freshmen, and thought I was pretty hot. When I got into college I was the new guy.
There were a lot of people in the Central State band who had been there 3 years before me, and who took music classes all day long, while I was just taking the one band class, like I'd done in high school. By comparison I sucked, and after that I never again took another music course.
I graduated from CSC (now UCO) in sociology and minoring in psychology / economics. I kept going broke and dropping out, and changed my major once, so it took seven years to get through.
By that time, my baby was in the graduation audience. (18 years later, that baby graduated from HS in the same football stadium, and later from college in the same spot.)
The "Story Wizard" asks "What's your greatest surprise?"
Other than someone's discovering that beer is a health food, it may have been discovering a college degree isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Actually, I decided to go to college when I was in the 3rd grade. My mother came home from work, and was mad at her supervisor.
"She doesn't know anything, she doesn't have to work, and she makes more money than everybody there," she said.
I asked, "If she doesn't know anything, and doesn't have to work, then why does she make more money than everybody?"
"Because she's been to college. If you've been to college, you don't have to work, and you make more money than everybody."
I thought to myself, "That's for me."
I was the first in my family to begin (but not the first to complete) a college degree, so nobody knew much about it. Nobody in my church had a college degree either, except for the preacher.
Everybody I knew thought if you were on the other side of that fence, it was easy street. A bowl of cherries and a bed of roses. Employers would bid against one another to get you, money would just fall off the trees, and the world would await your learned advice.
When I worked in a gas station, my boss actually said to me, "Guys like you are a dime a dozen." (That was when a dime was worth about 50c in today's money.) After college, the attitude was sometimes like, "You're not paid to think, you're paid to do as you're told." I guess that's progress.
That boss actually helped to keep me going. When I found myself wiping windshields or clerking in a store, I'd think, "I've gotta get back into school, one way or another." I didn't want to go through life as anybody's dime-a-dozen boy.
Many years later I graduated a second time from NTSU (now UNT) in Denton, Tx, in family counseling. Took some courses at TWU (Texas Woman's U) in Denton, though I could never pass the physical. When I went to register at NTSU, I looked at my choices, including agency counseling, substance abuse counseling, or family counseling.
From experience, I expected that agency counseling would involve a lot of petty staff backbiting, and substance abuse counseling would require me to work for an agency, or in private practice, my clients wouldn't keep their appointments or pay me.
Marriage and family counseling looked good because 50% of marriages end in divorce, and I was reeling from one myself. Kind of like the guy who's hit by a truck, and looks around to see what did it.
I managed to produce 3 kids, who live around Edmond. There are 2 grandkids now, and some step grandchildren.
When Nixon was impounding funds, I was laid off from my job as director of activities at the Job Corps in Guthrie, and discovered that there were swarms of people in my field all over Oklahoma City, looking for the same jobs I was.
I wound up in Pecos, Texas, doing seismograph work, putting geophones on the ground and picking them up later. A Sinclair crew had come through El Reno many years earlier, and hired my brother as a laborer. He worked his way up through the ranks, and found me a job with his company in Pecos. (He eventually became national head of seismograph activity for Atlantic-Richfield.)
I later switched companies, and was a "junior observer," or assistant manager for the new company, sitting on the back of a truck with a computer, and thumping the ground by radio signal for a seismograph crew.
When repeal of the oil depletion (tax) allowance caused a crash in the oil business, I went to work for the local newspaper as "city editor." That actually meant reporter, photographer, and columnist. I had been writing letters to the editor, and the publisher came over to my house and asked me to come to work for him.
Eventually I moved on to the Dallas area and did some newspaper work there.
Newspaper work = starvation, so I worked about 5 years as a photographer for the Olan Mills company, which also had its pros and cons. It has about a 100% annual turnover rate, so if you're ever looking for a job, they're guaranteed to have one open.
Eventually, it was back to school, and a complete change of course. I wound up in mental health and family counseling, though I had entered college with an eye on electronics engineering.
I can still tell you the fundamental theorem of differential calculus, though so far I've had absolutely no use for it, just like identities in trigonometry or diagramming sentences. I don't exactly remember what pluperfect meant, though, and I can't say much about a predicate, either.
After 15 years in Texas, I returned to Oklahoma and worked in a sex offender program in the OK prison system, for a family violence program at Fort Sill, and was at a battered women's shelter in Lawton for six years.
While there, I also worked part-time at the local prison, so far the third prison I'd worked in. I'm now working for a counseling agency in OKC.
I've written a novel, though my publisher, Publish America, who has the copyright now, mainly just tries to sell copies to the authors. I'm currently writing another novel, about fraud and corruption in the mental health business. I'm dragging my feet getting it done, though.
I have a website at Unitarian-Universalist.Encyclopedia.Wetpaint.com. It was intended to be a wiki, but I'm about the only one who posts there.
I also have a section at Facebook.
Though I missed the 2009 reunion, we can meet again at age 78, I think. Maybe we can pool our social security checks and have an orgy, while there's still time.
The interests section just has a checklist, and almost nothing there applies to me. You'd think they'd have one called "other."
Then, maybe I'd pick sleeping, eating, ****ing, channel surfing and web surfing, plus wishful thinking and fanny gawking. Lately, a good BM has become a goal in life. But do they include those on their checklist? Oh, no-o-o-o!
Idea 6 of 30 says, "Do you have a hero?" That changes from time to time. At one time it included Ralph Nader, but today if he would slip on a banana peel and fall down a flight of stairs, I wouldn't mind a whole lot.
At one time it included JFK, though that dimmed after his passing, as I read more about him. But his intentions were good, and he made really great speeches.
That list would include Bill Lear, Archibald Cox, Mother Teresa, and Alexander Dubcek. Today Barak Obama is right up there at the top. (Incidentally, Judge Bork would be near the top of my poo-poo list, along with Idi Amin and Pol Pot.)
Idea 4 of 30 says, "What's the wildest thing you ever did in school?"
Maybe it was the day Bilby Irvine and I tried to climb the water tower. We got most of the way up, the ladder started tilting backward, and we chickened out. At our next reunion, I'd like to climb up there with a spray can, and write "Seniors 59," though the new water tower doesn't have a ladder.
Maybe it was the time I locked up the Nebraska U football team. I was at Owens Stadium with either Bilby Irvine or maybe Bert Yant, on a band trip. We walked by the visiting team locker room, and saw a padlock on the door. I closed the hasp and snapped the lock and we went on. The game wasn't more than maybe 15 minutes late getting started.
When I was in the 6th grade, I got my brother, who was in the 4th grade, to do my math homework. I had to know how, to teach him to do it, and then he would do the problems because he was proud that a 4th grader could do 6th grade work. We both had bad handwriting, so I didn't even have to copy anything over.
When I was in the 5th grade, my teacher would never call on me if I raised my hand. (I was PWT, and didn't merit being addressed.) However, she would always call on me if I l...Expand for more
ooked out the window.
I learned that if I knew the answer to a question, to just look out of the window, and she would call on me. She always looked surprised when I gave her the correct answer, but she never caught on.
Idea 13 of 30 says, "Which teacher would you love to see again?" That would be Miss Phillips. She was never my teacher, but all the boys loved seeing her in the hallway.
It says, "What's the wierdest job you ever had?"
Most of my jobs have been kind of wierd, in some way. Working on the railroad, I had a conductor in Sioux City, IA, who told me if I was afraid to leap from car to car when the train was moving, I didn't have any business working there.
Being a 19-year-old kid, I believed him and did that, despite the fact that one stumble would have sent me falling 12 feet to the ground between two moving cars. He just wanted to get home earlier. Anyway, I was young and bulletproof then.
Once I was sleeping in a caboose in Enid, when my conductor and another guy woke me up. He kept telling me there was a train wreck outside, and then I heard him say "I don't think he gives a s***."
When I woke up a couple of hours later, there was a passenger train lying on its side on the track right next to me. There was a rip along the side of every car, with pink insulation poking out.
I was told that a switch engine had been waiting for the train to pass, and the crew fell asleep. When they woke up, they decided it had passed, and pulled on to the track. That's when the train came by. One of our classmates was on the switch engine.
I've been told I could sleep through a train wreck, and I guess that proved it, at least when I was a teen. (That would be nice, now.)
I was once hired to find a diamond among a thousand pieces of broken glass by a road. Never found anything, though.
For a short time I scraped sheep manure from a barn in Norway. I helped put sod on the roof of a log cabin there.
I once taught a hot check course. I once tutored freshmen, who hadn't learned what they teach in high school. I once taught GED in a jail.
In the national guard, I was once given an assignment to dig a hole 6' by 6 by 6, in solid rock, to be used for a garbage sump. I was unsuccessful. The job was eventually done with a pound of TNT.
When I worked for Olan Mills I once stood inside a camera in Chattanooga. It was a dark room with a projector on one side, and a piece of film the size of a bedsheet on the far wall. It was used for making backdrops.
I spent some time in the finance business, mostly in collections. One time I approached a delinquent customer in a gas station, and he began telling me all his troubles.
"Maybe I'll just take care of it with this," he said, and pulled out an army .45 and laid it on the counter. I asked what he meant, and he said he might just do himself in. When I realized he didn't mean me, I got a $5 late fee from him and left.
One time I was supposed to get a payment from a guy, or repossess his car. When I got to the house he wasn't home, but there was a car in his yard exactly matching the make, model, and color of the one I wanted.
I called the office, they sent a tow truck, and we towed the car back to the office. When we checked the number, it wasn't the right one, so we towed it back to the man's yard, left it there, and quietly slipped away.
I once worked in a hospital for the criminally insane. There, if somebody hanged himself, they would cut down the tree he did it on, and leave the others standing. Then they would report to Austin they had solved the problem.
All the patients in a unit had to shave with the same razor, though it was known that some of them had HIV or hepatitis B. That was so they could keep track of the razors.
They kept a big punch bowl full of condoms on a counter, for the patients to pick up, in the name of fighting HIV. However, if you used one, you were breaking a rule, and if you picked one up, they knew you intended to break the rule. Nobody ever took one. They may have been mentally ill, but they weren't crazy.
One of our patients had an STD, but the staff would not take time to tell his wife, saying, "We've got enough to do to take care of our own patients." Obviously he had infected her, and obviously, when he got home she would re-infect him.
You could tell which ones were patients and which were staff, because the staff carried keys.
I once worked in a mental hospital for kids, that was closed down for child abuse. They didn't train their support staff, who just ran on common sense.
Common sense didn't work, and they were just doing what they might do at home if their own kids acted like that. The kids were there because they had already defeated their schools, parents, foster parents and outpatient counselors with their bad behavior.
We had one 7-year-old boy who had killed his mother and had attempted to kill a baby. He was actually a pretty nice little kid, and couldn't understand why the foster parents didn't want him back, since he had been friendly to the baby on visits.
As kids were removed from the center, eventually he was the only one left. Nobody would take him after his foster mother finished telling them all how bad he was.
They had to keep the place open, with support staff there 24 - 7, just to take care of him. They sent out to McDonald's to feed him. I left there before he did.
For a while I hypnotized people, mostly for weight loss and to stop smoking.
I once hypnotized a guy to win at a karate contest, and several young gymnists to be able to do backflips. I hypnotized several people to "smoke" air instead of marijuana or crack.
One person wanted me to hypnotize him to be lucky at gambling, and another wanted me to hypnotize her to have more than 24 hours in a day. Another wanted me to hypnotize his friend to force him to say if he had stolen some money from him. I may be God, but there's only so much I can do.
When I was doing seismograph work, I had a new supervisor, and we went to a mountain job site. He drove wildly over narrow mountain roads, yelling and cursing at the other drivers and just generaly being a jerk. You could look down from the road and see the eagles soaring in the distance below.
When we were set up in the back of the truck and working, he suddenly yelled and ran outside. I picked up the radio cord and continued pressing the button until the set was finished.
Then I walked outside, and saw him having a siezure in the seat of the pickup truck. After that, he never did the driving.
In the third Job Corps center I worked in, I was called a counselor, but mostly did paperwork. I was supposed to call a kid in, talk to him for 5 minutes, and have him sign something saying I had counseled with him.
The idea was to convince the Labor Dept., who inspected our files, that we were doing a great job. The reports never said how long the meeting lasted.
Whenever I got a kid who was having a serious problem, I had to stop doing my "real" work and talk to him for 30 minutes or an hour. Too many of those would throw me way behind. I couldn't refer him to the psychologist, because she was running behind on paperwork, too.
I suspect it's a little off the beaten track to counsel with rapists and pedophiles in a prison, army wife beaters, and women's shelter wives who have been beaten.
Idea 26 of 30 says, "In 10 years I hope to be" (--alive--) "I'm going to get there by" (--not dying for 10 years.--)
Idea 29 of 30 says, "My first job was at (--the national guard--) where I got paid (--$1.76 a day.--) What I remember most about it is" (--mopping floors, cleaning grease traps, washing pots, washing toilets, digging and filling up holes, loading and unloading trucks, wearing baggy clothes, polishing brass, shining boots, hearing lots of extreme swearing by teens and 20-somethings playing like they're in the "real" army, driving a jeep before I had a driving license, shooting a really big rifle that went "BAA-LAMM!!" shooting at targets shaped like men, firing a bazooka, driving a tank for 5 minutes, talking on 2-way radios when that was uncommon, and saying cool things like, "Roger, Wilco, Over," firing a .30 caliber machine gun loaded with blanks, and using M-80 firecrackers for hand grenades.
(Yeah, I know... To women that sounds dumb, but it's a guy thing.)
National guard officers were into looking good. When we fired a bazooka, we were required to keep our helmets on, for safety, said the brilliant ones. The barrel was on one's right shoulder, and we had to balance the helmets on the left side of our heads, which would do nothing to protect us if the thing blew up.
When we fired it, it made a very loud BAM!! which was captured in the helmet and amplified into the left ear. Some people reported a ringing in the ears or even a rattling for days afterward. But the important thing was, if a colonel came driving by, everybody looked good and the officers seemed to be doing a great job.
I once turned in a rifle I had cleaned, and was told it was dirty, so I cleaned it again, and was told the same thing. Realizing they were jerking me around, I just went back to my area, laid on my bunk and read a magazine. After about the 5th time, they took it, with a "Well, at last, you got it right."
Somewhat later I got a job in Burgess' gas station for 50c an hour, half the minimum wage even then. He kept a poster stating the minimum wage and where to complain, that was required by law to be displayed, hanging on the wall of an office he kept locked.
Idea 30 of 30: "...a memory you'll never forget."
Maybe that would be getting an F on an essay in an English class, because the teacher said it was so good I couldn't possibly have done it myself.
Or maybe it was watching Sherry Rogers go up a flight of steps in a tight skirt.
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